The Organization has 54 field offices around the world. Its headquarters are located in Paris, France.

Its mission is to contribute to the building of peace, the eradication of poverty, sustainable development and intercultural dialogue through education, the sciences, culture, communication and information.

The Organization focuses, in particular, on two global priorities, Africa and Gender equality, and supports the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted at the 70th session of the United Nations General Assembly, through all its programmes.

Softwareheritage.org, UNESCO and Inria open the Archive of the Digital Age

Paris, 06 June—UNESCO and Inria will open the archive of Softwareheritage.org, a worldwide initiative to create a universal library of computer programme source codes since the dawn of the digital age on June 7.

One year after the signing of a partnership agreement between Inria and UNESCO, the launch event at UNESCO’s Headquarters on 7 June (3 to 4.30 pm), will include a demonstration of the website’s functions, with the participation of François Sillion, Chief Executive Officer of the French National Institute for computer science and applied mathematics (Inria).

The Softwareheritage initiative aims to preserve and share the source codes of all software programmes that have been giving life to computers since the middle of last century.

Over 4 billion unique source code files, including their successive iterations and more than 83 million software projects in all fields are already available from the online archive.

UNESCO encourages universal access to information and the preservation of knowledge. The Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage, adopted in 2003, states that digital documents include, among a wide range of electronic formats, texts, databases, images, audio-documents and Web pages.

“Softwareheritage.org marks a necessary addition to UNESCO’s longstanding heritage work,” says Audrey Azoulay, the Director-General of UNESCO. “The project embodies commitments that are at the heart of our mandate: favouring the free flow of information and culture, and fostering intellectual cooperation for peace and development.”

Roberto Di Cosmo, Director of the project welcomed the fact that “The opening to the public of the Software Heritage archive is an important milestone: everyone can at last consult and download the contents of the archive we have been building for three years. We are on a long-term mission, and much remains to be done. We need to find and archive all the source codes that are still missing, and add features that will make the archive easy to use for everybody: developers, scientists, historians, and society as a whole. We need new partners, and the support of all to develop the archive further.”

Available in English, French and Spanish, softwareheritage.org, marks a strong commitment to preserve and share the knowledge embedded in software, notably in open source programmes. Software Heritage has received the support of numerous private and public bodies and institutions including, Microsoft, Intel, Société Générale and Bell Labs, to name but a few.